She lifted her shoulders, patted her arms. “It’s cold out, hon. Can’t we talk tomorrow? I’ll come by the store.”

“No. Come here.” She made a gesture of giving up with her spread arms and slowly navigated the step and parked herself on the step below him, holding her arms in her thin coat. Ray took off his parka and put it over her shoulders, and she smiled at him and pulled the sleeves together.

They had started talking, Ray finding her coming out of Kelly’s or Chambers and walking her home. Trying to pull her into the store instead of letting her go back up the hill to the bars. Bringing her books she didn’t read.

“Adrienne.”

“What can I do for you, hon? You lonely?”

“No. Adrienne, you need help.”

She stood up slowly and turned to look down at him. “And you’re going to help me?”

“I’ll do what I can.” He lifted a shoulder, not sure how this should go.

In the cold light he saw her face close up, a subtle shift in her muscles, the way a closed hand becomes a fist. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Nobody. But you need a friend.”

“I got all the fucking friends I need. The bars are full of them.” She shucked the coat and threw it down at his feet.

“I don’t think those are your friends, Adrienne.”

“What the hell do you know about it? What the hell do you want from me anyway?”

He jammed up, not ready for her to be so amped up, ready to fight. “Don’t you want to get right? Get clean?”

“So I can be what, like you? Your life’s a picnic and I’m invited?”

“No, man. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know is right.” She stalked up the steps, her small, hard shins banging his bad leg. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You don’t know me.”

“Adrienne.”

She took a couple of steps back down toward him, and he retreated, almost losing the rail.

“I lost my father. One day he’s a lawyer and he’s got money and respect and he takes care of me and the next day he’s dead, and his name gets dragged through the mud, and now he’s a shit-bag who stole money, and how do I even know what’s true? Everyone knows but me. Everyone knows he’s a shitbag. And me? I’m the shitbag’s daughter. You going to make that go away? Are you?”

“No.”

“And how do you even know my name? Where did you come from?”

“I’m nobody. I just thought…”

“Yeah, you just thought.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Go home, Ray.”

“Adrienne. Goddammit.” “Go home.”

TWO O’CLOCK IN the morning and Ray’s cell rang at the apartment on Mary Street. He looked at the number and didn’t recognize it.

He whispered, “Hello?” Michelle sat up, widening her eyes to clear the sleep, her hair rucked to one side from sleeping on it. He kissed her and winked while he listened. Then his face changed and he started nodding.

HE HADN’T BEEN inside Manny’s in almost a year. It was a narrow apartment fronting 611, quiet now at three in the morning. He looked right and left moving through the dark parking lot, the careful habits of his old life slow to desert him.

Sherry met him at the door, small and pale under unwashed black hair, speed- rapping about how she couldn’t get him up and he was just so lazy and she thought about an ambulance but who was paying for that? He put her in a chair in front of the tele vi -sion, noticing the scattered potato chip wrappers, the empty beer cans on the table, the smell. The same smell he’d got off the bag Manny’d left at Theresa’s. Sherry chewed her nail and watched an infomercial with couples in Hawaii wearing flower print shirts and looking painted into the scenery, tapped her feet on the table, blinking.

He made his way back to the bedroom where Manny was stretched out, blue and still. The orange sodium lamps on the street half lit the room, a salvage diver’s light illuminating a tiny wedge of a wreck in black water. He was facing up, naked to the waist, and Ray sat down next to him and touched an arm like cold putty. He got out his cell, called an ambulance, and waited. Heard Sherry muttering to herself about getting a dog, about money she was owed by her sister in Kutztown.

Manny’s mom had died when they were in Juvie. Abducted from some bar in Bristol, left in plastic bags by the side of the road. When he heard the CO say it, Manny slugged him in the face and ran for the fence. Three guards brought him down, got him in a choke hold and threw him into Isolation, and Ray went that night, one of the female guards taking him back to the door to try to calm Manny down. Ray banged on the door, called out, and looked through the tiny, smudged window, seeing nothing. Finally he slid open the chute and stuck his arm through and grabbed Manny around his skinny bicep and just held on, feeling the muscle vibrate and hearing his friend’s ragged breath.

On the nightstand he found Manny’s sunglasses and put them over his eyes, smoothed the hair away from his face. Fit his hand around Manny’s bicep and squeezed.

HE STAYED UP all night, first emptying dope and guns out of the apartment and Manny’s car before the cops came through, then finding Sherry’s sister and getting her to come down to pick her up at the hospital where they took Manny. When he left Abington Memorial it was nearly dawn, so he drove up to the Eagle and got a cup of coffee and some toast. When he paid, he went outside and the sky was just starting to go blue at the edges.

He’d have to get Sherry into rehab, have to watch her and take care of her, and it would probably all be for nothing, but that’s how it would go and there wasn’t anything to be done about it. He was starting to see an outline of the life in front of him. It was different than the one behind, harder to dope out, but he had to think it would be better. He had to believe in it, the way Theresa believed that prayers to St. Jude had brought him home safe from prison. Even if what he did never worked, if he was no good at it.

It would be where the money went, where his days got used up. Taking care of all the fucked- up people around him. Maybe because he’d been given this other chance he never earned. Because somebody loved him and he never understood why. Because the alternative was endless black night and dope dreams and there wasn’t anything else he could do.

AT DAWN HE took a bag into the garage at Theresa’s house. He went through Bart’s scarred wood worktable, pulling tools out of the drawers and laying them quietly on the floor. A hammer, a punch gone black with age. A speckled boning knife, still carry -ing a faint, vinegary tang.

He dumped a dozen guns out on the floor, then knelt slowly, the cold from the cement grabbing at the bones in his knees. He looked at the guns a long time, picking up each one and putting it down. He held up the Colt, ejected the clip, worked the slide to spit a dull brass shell onto the floor. He worked methodically, re moving the barrel, the slide. Working the firing pin out with the punch, his fingers feeling thick and slow in the weak blue light from the window.

He separated the parts into two piles, then centered each part in front of him in turn and covered it with a decaying terrycloth rag. He raised the hammer and smacked each piece a few times, denting the barrel, snapping the magazine spring with his fingers. He had to get up periodically and work his knees, flex at the hips to keep from getting locked up. As the sun came up he began to sweat, and his hands got slick and black with old gun oil and grit.

He finally walked into the house and went into Theresa’s linen closet and got a bunch of pillowcases for his bed, moving quietly in the dark house.

She called from the kitchen. “What are you going to do with those guns?”

He jumped and banged the cane against the doorjamb. “Jesus Christ, don’t you sleep?”

“Not anymore.” She came to the hallway and handed him a mug of coffee.

He shook his head. “I’m getting rid of them. I smashed them up, so no one can find them and get hurt.”